My wife and I went on a diving holiday to the Red Sea early November 2021 with Blue O Two. The flight from the UK lasted about 5 hours and the transfer from the airport in Hurghada to our live-aboard boat, M/Y Blue Adventurer, about 20 minutes. I’ve dived with Blue O Two before and they are an excellent company. However, just two days after we returned to the UK, they went bust but have been immediately resurrected. We will find out if they have changed at all in March next year as about 14 members of our club are again off to the Red Sea on one of their live-abord holidays.
If you haven’t dived in the ed Sea then I can thoroughly recommend a diving holiday with Blue O Two in November. The water is warm (26C in November), the weather is nice (sunny and about 30C during the day) and the diving is stunning (30m+ visibility, great wrecks and reef and stunning coral reefs and reef fish). We dived on a live-aboard which mean we stayed on the dive boat for the whole week, doing up to 4 dives per day. This is a great format if you want to pack in lots of dives but shore based trips are also good fun and you can either dive from ‘day-boats’ (typically two dives per day) or do shore dives on a ‘house’ reef close to your hotel.
I did 20 dives of which 4 were night divers. Our diving itinerary was called ‘best of wrecks’ so most dives were on wrecks but, as most of these wrecks were close to coral reefs, we had a nice mix of wreck and reef diving.
Probably the most spectacular dives were: The Numidia, The Thistlegorm and the three wrecks we dived on the Sha’ab Abu Nuhas reef.
Numidia
Lies almost vertical on the reef wall of the Brothers Island about 35 miles off shore. The top of the wreck is at about 15m and the mostly intact wreck drops down to 80m. We had about 40m viz on this dive! The life on the wreck was stunning as was the life on the vertical reef wall. A profusion of soft and hard corals, lots of reef fish and great diving drifting along at about 20m along the reef wall. We dived this wreck twice and it was well worth the two visits.
Thistlegorm
This is a second world war cargo vessel that was sunk by German bombers. It sits upright in about 30m of water well away from any reef and with the top of the wreck at about 17m. It is mostly intact although the after hold, where the bombs hit is very broken. There are lots of places where you can swim safely through the inside of the wreck to see the cargo (trucks, guns, munitions, wellington boots etc). The outside of the wreck has been colonised to some extent by corals, there are plenty of fish on this wreck and there is deck cargo to explore like train carriages. We dived it 4 times which allowed us time to see all of the wreck and one dive was at night. One of the dives was with a current running of about 1.5kts which is quite strong and proved to be too much of a challenge for us so we terminated this dive early. However, this is a great dive on a huge and almost intact vessel. The viz was about 20m.
Sha’ab Abu Nuhas reef
There are 4 recks on this reef and we dived three of them: The Giannis D, The Chrisoula K and The Kimon M. They are all fairly similar, lying against the reef wall with the bottom at about 25m and the top at 5m. The wrecks are covered with soft and hard coral and there is a lot of fish life. The wrecks are quite open and some of the views from inside with the sunlight streaming through the broken wrecks are stunning. I did the Giannis D as a night dive and the moray eels we about, one must have been 1.5m long.
Here are some pictures from the trip.
